The Margins of Citizenship

This book explores the position of groups in society whose legal status or economic position makes them marginal citizenship, lacking the entitlement of full members of the polity. A team of distinguished contributors from the UK and North America, analyse the position of migrants, the disabled, prisoners, children, forced labourers and others, reflecting on the injustices they suffer and what this implies for our ideal of citizenship.

This book was published as a special issue of the Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy.

Citizenship is a central concept in political philosophy, bridging theory and practice and marking out those who belong and who share a common civic status. The injustices suffered by immigrants, disabled people, the economically inactive and others have been extensively catalogued, but their disadvantages have generally been conceptualised in social and/or economic terms, less commonly in terms of their status as members of the polity and hardly ever together, as a group.

This volume seeks to investigate the partial citizenship which these groups share and in doing so to reflect upon civic marginalisation as a distinct kind of normative wrong. For example, it is not often considered that children, though their lack of civic and political rights are marginal citizens and thus have something in common with other marginalised groups. Each of the book’s chapters explores some theoretical or practical aspect of marginal citizenship, and the volume as a whole engages with pressing debates in law and political theory, such as the limits of democratic inclusion, the character of social justice, the integration of migrants, and the enfranchisement of prisoners and children.

This book was published as a special issue of the Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy.